TEACHERS WHO CHEAT

Nearly all of the Houston elementary schools being investigated for possible cheating on the state's standardized achievement test produced sharply weaker exam results this year. Passing rates at all but one of the 18 schools under scrutiny dropped at a greater rate than the overall Houston Independent School District passing rate on the third-grade Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS, reading exam. Overall, the passing rate for the 14,751 HISD students who took the reading test that's used to determine whether they move on to the fourth grade fell 5 percentage points to 82 percent. Passing rates at the 18 schools in question fell an average of 19 percentage points. In addition, average scale scores, which measure the number of correctly answered questions, increased 10 points for HISD's English-speaking students but fell an average of nearly 70 points at the 18 schools under suspect.

Last year, 13 of the schools suspected of cheating had average scale scores that ranked in the top half of all HISD schools on the English exam. This year, that fell to four. Houston school district spokesman Terry Abbott cautioned against reading too much into the poorer results by the 18 schools. In an e-mail, Abbott pointed out that some of the 170 elementary schools that have not been suspected of cheating also posted scores substantially lower than last year's. Also, the cheating investigations at most of the schools are focusing on score anomalies at other grade levels and subjects, he said.

The sharp decline in scores is not direct proof of cheating or wrongdoing, but adds to suspicions, said Thomas Haladyna, an Arizona State University professor specializing in standardized test research. "You wonder about the validity of scores when they jump around like that," he said. Factors such as teacher turnover rates and changing student populations could cause major score changes, but that doesn't explain why virtually every suspected school regressed more than the typical campus, Haladyna said.

The questions of cheating arose after an investigation by The Dallas Morning News last year found strong evidence that educators were helping students cheat at nearly 400 schools statewide, including Houston. Last month, two Houston fifth-grade math teachers were fired and the school principal was demoted after determining the teachers gave answers to students and the principal should have known about the cheating. The teachers have denied any wrongdoing.


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U.K.: COMPUTERS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR REAL TEACHING

The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today. The findings raise questions over the Government's decision, announced by Gordon Brown in the Budget last week, to spend another £1.5 billion on school computers, in addition to the £2.5 billion it has already spent. Mr Brown said: "The teaching and educational revolution is no longer blackboards and chalk, it is computers and electronic whiteboards."

However, the study, published by the Royal Economic Society, said: "Despite numerous claims by politicians and software vendors to the contrary, the evidence so far suggests that computer use in schools does not seem to contribute substantially to students' learning of basic skills such as maths or reading." Indeed, the more pupils used computers, the worse they performed, said Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Wossmann of Munich University. Their report also noted that being able to use a computer at work - one of the justifications for devoting so much teaching time to ICT (information and communications technology) - had no greater impact on employability or wage levels than being able to use a telephone or a pencil.

The researchers analysed the achievements and home backgrounds of 100,000 15-year-olds in 31 countries taking part in the Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) study in 2000 for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Pisa, to the British and many other governments' satisfaction, claimed that the more pupils used computers the better they did. It even suggested those with more than one computer at home were a year ahead of those who had none. The study found this conclusion "highly misleading" because computer availability at home is linked to other family-background characteristics, in the same way computer availability at school is strongly linked to availability of other resources. Once those influences were eliminated, the relationship between use of computers and performance in maths and literacy tests was reduced to zero, showing how "careless interpretations can lead to patently false conclusions".

The more access pupils had to computers at home, the lower they scored in tests, partly because they diverted attention from homework. Pupils tended to do worse in schools generously equipped with computers, apparently because computerised instruction replaced more effective forms of teaching.

The Government says computers are the key to "personalised learning" and computers should be "embedded" in the teaching of every subject. Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, has said: "We must move the thinking about ICT from being an add-on to being an integral part of the way we teach and learn."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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